Me, in 2013: “Man, Games Workshop have all of these awesome licenses lying around for boardgames that they no longer make. They should give some of them to game developers so that they can make digital adaptions. Like Space Hulk. A Space Hulk video game would be very good.”

Me, in 2018: “Please stop making Space Hulk video games.”

Space Hulk: Tactics is the third Space Hulk adaptation to be released in the last five years, and the fourth if you count the Space Hulk: Ascension rerelease. Full Control’s Space Hulk was the first, completely straight adaptation of the ruleset, and it was very, very bad. I reviewed it a while back, which is convenient because it means I don’t have to waste any time here describing what Space Hulk is; you can just go and read the 2014 review. Streum On Studio then took the series first-person with Deathwing in an attempt to make an objective-based horde shooter along the lines of Left 4 Dead or Vermintide, and this was also very, very bad. I bought it on release and it wouldn’t even boot; thankfully this was just after the introduction of Steam refunds¹ so I spent the money on something more worthwhile. I later tried the “remastered” version of Deathwing that supposedly fixed all of the bugs and balancing problems, only to discover that Streum On Studio are yet another developer that do not understand Space Hulk. If they understood Space Hulk they wouldn’t have made the Terminators’ Storm Bolters feel like they were pelting my genestealer enemies with balls of wet tissue paper, and they wouldn’t have made the Power Sword feel like whacking them with a foam baton, and they definitely would have come up with some more interesting mission concepts than “wander around inside a brown toilet for fifty minutes so that you can find and push a button”.

In short, Space Hulk has not had a happy history since Games Workshop reversed their previous licence-shy policy and started throwing them at anyone with a terrible Castle Crusher knockoff in need of reskinning, so I’m a little surprised that Cyanide have decided to try and break the curse with Space Hulk: Tactics. Tactics goes back to the Full Control model of doing a straight adaption of the boardgame rules, and all of the core mechanics are present and correct — Action Points, Overwatch, narrow corridors, bolter jams, and so on. However, Cyanide have also been responsible for three separate adaptations of Blood Bowl for PC and console so they’ve gotten some valuable experience that’s enabled them to avoid the more obvious pitfalls that claimed Full Control’s version, and thanks to that cautionary tale they’ve also grasped that they need to go above and beyond those core mechanics in order to make Space Hulk work as a video game.

Space Hulk: Tactics therefore includes a Terminator campaign where your squad explores the space hulk via a simple node-based map. The hulk is split into chunks, and at the end of each chunk is an unavoidable scripted mission very similar to the ones in the Sin Of Damnation campaign (so they have generic objectives like push a button, flame a room and so on), but before you get there you have to navigate around locked doors, through warp gates, can detour to pick up resources for upgrades etc. Each node you visit ticks up a threat counter at the side of the map, and once the threat counter hits certain milestones it’ll either splat a bunch of Genestealer icons onto the map, which trigger a randomised battle when you walk onto them, or else just straight up throws you into a randomised battle. These quickly become tedious since the rewards you get from them are marginal; Tactics does throw you a bone by allowing you to leave behind a randomly-selected member of the squad to hold off the Genestealers and thus skip the battle, but this means that they won’t be available for the next scripted mission and so if the game has randomly selected your Assault Cannon Terminator you don’t really have much choice but to sit through the battle instead. You can spend the resources you pick up on the campaign map on an extremely vestigial set of upgrades for your Terminators that mostly consist of unlocking weapons that are usually standard issue in the boardgame, like Lightning Claws and Chainfists.

This campaign layer is so unimpactful that I’m not entirely sure why Cyanide bothered, except that it allows them to pad out the campaign’s running time while the game’s talking heads vomit out some of the most atrociously hackneyed dialogue I have ever seen in a video game. The Warhammer 40k IP is no stranger to writing so bad it barely qualifies as fanfiction, but even by these standards Space Hulk: Tactics’ dialogue sounds like the sort of thing I’d expect an eleven year-old to come up with in their creative writing classes, to the point where I felt very sorry for the poor voice actors who had to read it. The new in-mission additions are slightly better, consisting of a collection of cards that can be played during your turn to provide buffs to your Terminators and debuffs to the Genestealers.  Many of these buffs are, well, a bit duff, but some of them are very powerful, such as the one that gives a Terminator four extra action points. In theory the buffs could be quite useful — there’s cards which boost Terminator melee rolls or take away melee dice from Genestealers — but there are some horrendous AI issues that mean you’ll almost never use them. I’ll be getting to the AI in just a moment, but the shortcomings there ensured that the main use I found for the tactics cards was to convert them to squad-wide action points — you can only convert a single card per turn and each card is worth a different amount of AP, but any amount of extra AP is useful to boost the mobility of your ponderous Terminator lumps.

In terms of the actual Space Hulk gameplay, Tactics is a much better implementation than the Full Control Space Hulk. If you’ve read my review of the Full Control Space Hulk, you’ll know that this is a case of damning it with faint praise as Full Control set a very low bar for Cyanide to clear. Tactics has an interface that (bafflingly) is clearly designed for gamepads and which is awkward to use with a mouse and keyboard, and this time there’s no option to speed up the game and the Cyanide Terminators are just as slow as the Full Control ones. However, while there’s no way to move Terminators simultaneously you can at least queue up  orders while you’re waiting for a Terminator to complete their move, cutting down somewhat on the feeling of time-wasting frustration, and the UI is a little more friendly and incorporates many of the lessons that Cyanide have learned from spending the last decade working on Blood Bowl games. There’s a clear distinction between movement that uses Terminator AP and movement that will require the extra squad-wide AP points, and Tactics will even helpfully point out all of the squares that are potentially in range of Genestealer movement and melee attacks. Cyanide make the same mistake Full Control did by representing attack success odds as a percentage chance instead of the dice rolls that it’s actually doing, but it does at least show you the outcome of those dice rolls without your having to delve into a combat log to get to them. In terms of feel, Tactics correctly portrays Storm Bolters as the automatic hand cannons that they are supposed to be, and the melee animations are meaty and satisfying.  If you asked me which Space Hulk adaptation I prefer I’d first ask if I had to play one at all, but after some prodding I’d probably go for Space Hulk: Tactics as the least painful to deal with; it has more than its fair share of problems, but is at least borderline playable without driving the user to distraction.

That is, until you notice that the AI is utter shit.

I genuinely don’t understand what’s so difficult about coding a competent Genestealer AI for a Space Hulk game. This isn’t Civilization or Total War. The maps are static; they’ve been hand-crafted by a human and there’s nothing procedural about them. The objectives are static. The Terminator spawn points are static. The Genestealer spawn points are static. The actual behaviour that you have to code in for the Genestealers is not overly complicated: spawn a bunch of blips relatively close to the Terminators, move towards them avoiding Overwatch squares if you can, and then once you have enough Genestealers to overwhelm a Terminator’s Overwatch rolls you rush them. If the AI has got five Genestealers waiting around the corner and they have to travel over three squares of Overwatch to get to a Terminator it should be able to figure out roughly what its odds of success are based on the number of to-hit rolls that are likely to be made and their required result: my back-of-the-envelope calculations make it around a 50% chance of at least one Genestealer making it close enough to punch the Terminator in the face, and that’s without factoring in the Terminator having to make so many Overwatch rolls that his Storm Bolter will likely jam. Those aren’t the best odds, but they’re not terrible either; if I were playing the Genestealers I’d definitely take a punt because my Genestealers are absolutely replaceable while any Terminators I kill stay dead forever².

The Space Hulk: Tactics AI disagrees, however. The Tactics Genestealer AI has a pathological fear of wandering into Overwatch firing arcs; if it only has to go over a single square it might decide to chance it, but it will never attempt to charge down two or more squares covered by Overwatch. This makes it pathetically easy to lock off huge portions of the ship. I have many, many screenshots — some of which you can find in this review — of eight or nine Genestealers and blips bunched up in corridors and intersections who refuse to move any further because of Overwatch.  Admittedly the Genestealers’ odds in some of these scenarios were pretty bad, but a human player would figure that their biologically-engineered killing machines aren’t doing a whole lot of good sitting around a corner playing cards and decide to try their luck, and I don’t understand why the AI can’t do the same.  To make things even worse, if you’ve locked off one of the Genestealer spawn points by setting up Overwatch that covers the exit from the access corridor, the AI will still continue to spawn blips there until it physically can’t fit any more into the available space. This is an issue that becomes particularly pronounced when you get the Librarian and his Psychic Barrier power, which has a huge range and can be used to neutralise eight or nine Genestealer blips by blocking them in.

And of course because the AI is spawning all of its blips into a corridor that terminates in either a raging torrent of psychic hellfire or an extremely grumpy Terminator with an Assault Cannon, that means the rest of your squad has far fewer Genestealers to contend with and can get on with completing the mission objectives. The missions all come with twenty turn time limits, which is absurd when the AI is such a pushover you’ll be able to complete them in the six turns it takes your Terminators to physically walk to the objective. The supine AI also renders those tactics cards somewhat pointless as most of them are used to improve your odds of fighting Genestealers, but you’re never actually fighting Genestealers because they’re all hiding around the corner and refuse to come out and play.

The Space Hulk: Tactics single-player campaign is consequently a braindead cakewalk that self-sabotages the few new elements it introduces to the Space Hulk formula, and is absolutely not worth the frankly absurd asking price of £35. Tactics does have what appears to be a fairly comprehensive set of multiplayer functionality, but after my experiences playing Blood Bowl online I wasn’t in any great hurry to try this out, and anyway if I want to play Space Hulk with a human being I could just use Full Control’s version, which implements the core ruleset just as faithfully and for less money, or I could use my copy of the actual boardgame. Oh, and I did try a couple of missions of the Genestealer campaign just to see what it was like, but — predictably — the Terminator AI was even worse than the Genestealer AI since it blundered multiple Terminators into range of my Genestealers and then turned its back on them instead of going into Overwatch. Those Terminator squads didn’t last long, and neither did my time with Space Hulk: Tactics; my biggest regret is that the six hours I spent with it means I can’t get a refund the way I did with Deathwing, and so my Steam account is now stuck with a second subpar Space Hulk adaptation for the foreseeable future.

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What is it with Games Workshop and shoddy/unimaginative conversions of their board games?

Okay, that’s not quite fair on Full Control. I am coming to their attempt at Space Hulk nearly a year after it was released, and while I heard some nasty things about it being a bug-ridden mess at the time I haven’t had a single technical problem with it, indicating that they’ve done some comprehensive patching work in the intervening period. That alone puts them above Cyanide, who still haven’t released a properly-functioning Blood Bowl game¹ after three attempts. Still, there’s something distinctly unambitious and characterless about this conversion, and I think it’s proof that EA had the right idea when they went for their semi-real-time first person take on the game all those years ago. Full Control have done exactly what the fans asked for and made a perfect 1:1 conversion of the board game rules, except that Space Hulk then runs into the same problem most straight board game conversions do: without the models and the setup and the dice rolling I feel that there’s nothing left to camouflage the fact that Space Hulk is, ultimately, a rather soulless experience.

Space Hulk is a turn-based asymmetric two-player game. One player controls a squad or two of Space Marine Terminators, heavily armoured super-soldiers with a wide variety of lethal projectile weaponry. The other player takes control of an unlimited number of slavering Genestealers, six-limbed monstrosities with a can opener on the end of each arm. The Terminator player deploys their squads and is given an objective to complete – usually retrieving an object from depths of the hulk’s narrow, winding interior and then escaping the map – and the Genestealer player has to stop them by spawning Genestealers from the many, many Genestealer entry points around the edge of the map and using them to kill enough Terminators to make successful completion of the objective impossible. Genestealers have no ranged attack, and while Terminators can only fire at things directly in their line of sight they can set up fields of fire that make it very, very difficult for the Genestealers to get close. If they manage to close to melee range, however, the tables are turned; Genestealers are sickeningly powerful in close combat and can easily tear open Terminator armour like it’s paper. Terminators are slow and ponderous, while Genestealers are quick and agile; the Genestealer player has to make use of that speed to flank the Terminators or else overwhelm them with sheer numbers.

Now, as an adversarial two-player game Space Hulk has a very high reputation amongst boardgamers, and it’s one which is boosted by the game’s comparative rarity; aside from a limited edition run back in 2009 (which sold out within a couple of weeks) it’s been out of production for twenty years. The idea of a faithful computer game adaptation is therefore doubly appealing; not only does it open up the series to an audience that wouldn’t be able to experience it otherwise but it affords the developer the opportunity to code an AI that can take the place of the Genestealer player, whose job was always more to simulate a competent AI opponent for the Terminator player than it was to win the game for its own sake anyway. As far as the first part goes, Space Hulk is a smashing success. What’s here is a 100% accurate reproduction of the Sin of Damnation campaign found in the boxed version of the game, along with a bunch of DLC campaigns you can purchase if you feel so inclined. If you ever wanted to try Space Hulk to see what all the fuss was about then you should absolutely consider Full Control’s version as an alternative to the boxed product. If you have a friend to play with I might even say that this is a good idea, since it means you’ll get the most out of the experience. Space Hulk has some weaknesses in the core ruleset, but that’s not the conversion’s fault and it performs admirably as a stand-in for the real thing.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in Space Hulk primarily as a single-player experience then I have some bad news. Without the adversarial nature of the two-player and the actual physical experience of handling a board and playing pieces to back it up, Space Hulk is exposed as a rather shallow game. It’s entirely reliant on odds-based dice rolling – roll 6 on either of two dice to kill a Genestealer with a storm bolter, roll higher on one dice than they do on three to kill them in melee combat – and Full Control have made the terrible decision to abstract these dice rolls out of the game entirely. They still happen, but they happen automatically in a little window at the corner of the screen, often too fast to follow and with no human input required in most places. I can understand the intent behind this – there is a lot of dice rolling in Space Hulk, and one of the advantages of doing a computer conversion is that you can streamline stuff like that – but there’s a difference between streamlining and almost removing it from the game entirely, especially when rolling those dice is practically all the game is.

Take the Overwatch mechanic. In general if you’re actually shooting at Genestealers during your turn in Space Hulk you or the Genestealer player have fucked up somewhere; either you let them get close or they let their Genestealers get exposed to bolter fire. It’s not something that happens all that often. Instead, the Terminator player’s main concern is to set their Terminators up in Overwatch and then end the turn; a Terminator in Overwatch will automatically fire at any Genestealer that enters their field of view, and they’ll fire every single time the Genestealer moves within that field of view. The odds of hitting the Genestealer are quite low – as previously mentioned, you have to roll 6 on either of two six-sided dice for the first shot, dropping to 5 for subsequent shots – but since a Genestealer must endure continual fire as they advance towards the Terminator the odds are in the Terminator’s favour – that is, unless they roll a double and their bolter jams. Jams can be cleared by spending a command point, but there’s only a limited pool of those to go around the entire squad and if you ever run out then the bolters dry up and suddenly you’re looking at a whole corridor full of Genestealer.

Understanding how these rolls work is very important for the sense of tension present in the board game version of Space Hulk. A Genestealer appears. Your Terminator takes a shot. He misses. The Genestealer moves closer. Your Terminator takes a shot. He misses. The Genestealer moves closer. Your Terminator takes a shot. He hits, and the Genestealer dies. Another Genestealer appears. Your Terminator’s bolter jams. The Genestealer moves closer. Your Terminator clears the jam and takes a shot. He misses. It’s this continual rolling of dice while this threshing machine on legs inches ever closer to your squad that gives Space Hulk its appeal – and it’s an appeal that’s been almost forcibly removed from this computer adaptation. In Space Hulk the video game, a Genestealer appears. He immediately darts forward three squares and gets shot in the space of about half a second while the computer makes all the ranged attack rolls in the background. Another Genestealer appears. He darts forward two squares before your Terminator announces he has a jam, and then that he’s automatically spent a command point to clear it (no input on your part necessary), and then the Genestealer dashes forward another two squares before being gunned down, again in the space of about a second.

This is much much faster than the boardgame, but far less interesting. It’s so fast, in fact, that most of the time you’ll only see the hits as the Genestealer goes through its death animation and won’t even notice the misses, and without a highly visible fail state to give context to the successes the game loses much of its sense of risk. Space Hulk goes out of its way to obfuscate the dice rolling, preferring instead to represent its dice rolls as percentages. Yes, I suppose the chance of rolling a 6 on either of two dice is technically 31%, but the human brain is actually very bad at understanding percentage chances (we tend to think that making that roll three times would lead to at least one success, when in fact it only gives you a two-thirds chance of making a successful roll) while we can instinctively relate to the concept of rolling a six on two dice. Severing the game’s connection to this real-world concept and having all the number-crunching happen in the background both makes it more difficult for the player to understand what’s going on and diminishes Space Hulk’s usually omnipresent feeling of tension.

This catastrophic neutering of what I always considered to be Space Hulk’s unique selling point exposes Space Hulk for what it ultimately is: a series of Genestealers running at you repeatedly, one after another, in the hope that eventually you’ll get unlucky and run out of command points with which to clear bolter jams. There’s some thought required in how to sequence your orders to the Terminators so that you don’t leave any gaping holes in your defence, but I suspect that it wouldn’t matter even if you did because the Genestealer AI is laughably bad. I should state up front that I am not an AI coder and have little idea of the intricacies of developing an AI which is a competent opponent, but I suspect it’s slightly easier to do for a game like Space Hulk, with its static maps, Genestealer spawn points and limited selection of paths, than it is something like Total War. As it is the AI will almost unfailingly spawn Genestealers from the spawn point nearest to your Terminators, who then follow the shortest possible route to reach them and try to kill them. It doesn’t spread out its Genestealer blips and it never tries to flank you, making it pretty much the dumbest AI you could possibly implement and one which is totally inadequate for providing any sort of challenge. It gets absurd at times, with the AI spawning all of its Genestealers into a corridor being covered by a Terminator with a Heavy Flamer and happily continuing to send them to their fiery doom until he runs out of ammo, and thanks to its predictability it is also incredibly easy to bait it into repeatedly attacking one of your Terminators set up in Overwatch while the rest complete the mission objective.

Now, for what it’s worth I don’t think the AI would have turned out anywhere near as badly as it did if it wasn’t for Full Control’s slavish dedication to replicating the Sin of Damnation campaign’s map layouts. Most of them don’t provide that many avenues for attacking the Terminators in the first place and give the Terminator player the luxury of picking and choosing their battles, and I think it’s fairly telling that during the one mission where the map was fairly open and I couldn’t bait the AI thanks to the mission objective which meant I had to walk across the whole damn thing, I lost two-thirds of the squad and just barely made it out by the skin of my teeth thanks to my Librarian getting lucky and managing to kill a Broodlord in close combat². If every mission had been like that Space Hulk would have been a much better game. It should be an oppressive, tense battle against an overwhelming opponent, not the outer space equivalent of a turkey shoot.

Did I like anything about Space Hulk? Well, the visual design does appropriately communicate how claustrophobic the environs of the space hulk actually are and effectively contrasts that with how huge and cumbersome your Terminators are when placed inside of it. Even here, though, the game manages to fuck up slightly by not giving you the ability to skip to the end of Terminator move animations by pressing space or clicking the mouse button, instead making you watch them spend five or six seconds waddling forward four squares unless you set animation speeds to fast in the options menu – which then means everything happens at 6x speed. The UI is also pretty good for the most part, but fails to tell you which moves will require your limited stock of command points unless you physically mouse over the square you want to move to. If you accidentally waste CPs this way there is a handy undo option, but it’s a really basic piece of UI design that (for example) Blood Bowl manages to get right with its Go For It moves by highlighting those squares in a different colour entirely, allowing you to tell at a glance when you’re going to be taking a risk.

All in all, then, Space Hulk is a very disappointing game. Mechanically it’s a perfect conversion, but Full Control have streamlined in places where they really shouldn’t, failed to streamline in places where they should, and have saddled it with one of the worst AIs I’ve seen in modern video gaming. I read a lot of previews where it was stated that Full Control “got” Space Hulk, but having played their take on it now I’d say nothing could be further from the truth. They don’t get Space Hulk, and never have; if they had they’d have understood that if you’re going to make a 1:1 conversion to try to capture what makes the board game so great you need to convert everything present in the board game, even the physical process of rolling the dice.  If they take that out then they need to make other changes to compensate, a la the first videogame adaptation of Space Hulk twenty-one years ago. That’s why that game was a far better Space Hulk despite tossing most of the rules and implementing its own weird first-person with limited freeze-time mechanic in their place, while this one just kind of sucks.

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